Working: Troubling signs of a jobless recovery are everywhere

WE usually don't need government statistics to tell us when times are bad.

We have a pretty good sense when family members and neighbors lose their jobs and can't find new ones.

You know it's rough when you hear from a steady stream of friends who call to ask about job openings and even the manager of your local grocery store is bemoaning the fact that he can't land that law-enforcement job he just spent months training for because of municipal budget cuts.

Even though the economy officially continues to grow based on gross domestic product data, there's no changing the fact that we're in the midst of a jobless recovery -- with the emphasis on the word jobless.

"We have a lot of energy people, but we don't have a lot of energy jobs," said Janice Hale-Harris, senior vice president and general manager of Lee Hecht Harrison, the outplacement firm in Houston that tries to find jobs for the displaced.

So with depressing commentary like that, it hardly seemed surprising when the Census Bureau reported last week that household income declined 1.1 percent last year for the second straight year.

And then there's the mind-boggling statistic that one of every four Texans doesn't have health insurance, the highest percentage of any state, according to data the Census Bureau released this week.

In the entire United States, the number of people without health insurance the entire year rose to 43.6 million people -- an increase of almost 6 percent. It happened as more Americans either lost their jobs, work in jobs that don't provide health insurance or are the victims of state budget cuts.

Those cuts, coupled with lower reimbursements for Medicare and Medicaid, will cost the Harris County Hospital District between $15 million and $30 million this year, estimated Wortham, who is also president of the Harris County AFL-CIO. The money has to be found somewhere, he said, by either raising taxes or cutting services.

Even workers who have health insurance are finding they're paying more for less coverage.

Employees who were once used to paying a flat $100 for outpatient surgery are now stuck with 10 percent of the entire bill, which can amount to hundreds of dollars. The $10 co-pays for prescription drugs have been replaced by complicated multitiered co-pay systems that require patients to cough up $50 and up for each prescription.

But as health care costs have increased -- 12.3 percent this year and 17.8 percent last year -- employees end up shouldering more of the cost, according to the survey.

"The share an employee is paying is greater now than it was in the past on an ever-increasing health care dollar," said Jim Watt, president of Employee Benefit Solutions, an employee benefit consulting firm in Houston.

And he attributes the shift to the rough economy.

"If the economy was better, we wouldn't have seen this," he said, because companies would not have wanted to upset their employees and make their health care benefits uncompetitive.

And then the raises -- not.

According to Hewitt, the human resource consulting firm that conducts an annual salary survey, last year's salary increases were the lowest it has seen in the 27 years it has been keeping track.

And it's not expecting raises, which last year ranged from 3.3 percent for nonunion hourly workers to 3.5 percent for executives, to be a whole lot better this year.

And, if the Labor Department gets its way, you might be saying goodbye to that overtime you have been depending on.

The Labor Department has proposed revamping the rules governing which employees are entitled to overtime, but because of a public outcry it has hit a huge snag in Congress. The Senate voted in September to block the new rules, and the House, which initially voted in July to back the administration's proposal, reversed itself Thursday and sided with the Senate.

The Labor Department contends that its studies show that 644,000 people would lose their overtime under the proposed changes. But the AFL-CIO has put the figure at 8 million.

That's a huge gap, and many members of Congress are clearly worried about the political ramifications of eliminating overtime for so many people during this tough economy, said Ellen Kearns, an employment lawyer in Boston with Epstein Becker & Green who focuses on wage and hour issues.

Kearns, the author of the 1,672-page book The Fair Labor Standards Act, said that even if the AFL-CIO is wrong and 4 million people lose their overtime, that's still 4 million unhappy voters.

"To Americans, it's just one more stab in the back," she said.

The big question now is what President Bush will do.

"If he vetoes the bill, is he handing the Democrats a wonderful election-year issue?" Kearns asked.